Weeknote #2: w/c 2023-08-21

This section is not part of the standard

The content in this section is only included to help explain the standard, provide examples or make recommendations about use.

It does not contain requirements for complying with the standard and is not governed by the formal standards process.

The information may not have been updated to accurately reflect Government policy.

Hello and welcome to our second weeknote! I’m Simon Worthington and I’m the data standards expert tasked with delivering the official UK Tariff Data Standard mentioned last week.

I’ve spent the week engaging with our existing standards implementers to work out what governance arrangements we will need. Engagement has been very positive so far, with all of our stakeholders coming back with reassuringly warm feedback about our work so far.

If you are a user of the data standard and you haven’t heard from me yet then don’t worry – chances are good that I’ll be contacting you next week. If not, we are currently targeting an open-invite standards process so you’ll still be able to get involved!

Why a data standard and why now

The standard we are using to exchange trade tariff information in the United Kingdom is based on TARIC3, specified by the European Union for use by its Member States. With such a mature and well-recognised standard already in use, why work on UK standard at all? We could of course bring forward TARIC3 for recognition as a pre-existing standard.

One problem is that the way in which the UK uses TARIC3 does not quite match the EU in every regard. For example, the EU’s model for regulation is highly complex and in TARIC3 there is graph structure that models how regulations supersede, prorogue and invalidate each other over time. We don’t use such a complex model in the UK, and so we need a data standard to formally agree and document what we do instead.

TARIC3 also only describes the structural and semantic content of the data – i.e. what it looks like and what it means. There’s a lot more to a good data standard that isn’t included. In the data standard we are writing, we want to document how the data is managed, where the historical quality issues are, how the standard evolves and what other data sources are drawn upon. These are UK-specific things around our ownership and management of UK data, so it makes sense for us to have our own standard to manage them.

Finally, we want to update the standard as the user needs of both tariff data publishers and consumers in the UK changes over time. We can’t make changes to TARIC3 as defined by the EU so we need a way to propose and agree changes amongst ourselves in line with the Open Standards Principles. By setting up an open standard with clear, precise language and publicly accessible governance arrangements, we will ensure that future changes can be made in a stable and controlled way and with full visibility to everyone in the international trade community that uses our tariff data.

So whilst we’re not proposing a major departure from TARIC3 or envisage any technical changes to border systems today, hopefully you can see why putting our shared data standard on a formal footing is a good idea!

What’s next?

Next week we’ll be proposing a first pass on governance arrangements with our standards stakeholders and I’ll be pair-writing with our content designer Patrick to find a clear, accessible style for documentation. In next week’s note, I’ll bring you what we know about our users of the standard and their needs and how we’re approaching the task of meeting them.